Trulock, Notra

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Trulock, Notra

(Notra Trulock, III)

PERSONAL: Male.

ADDRESSES: Agent—c/o Author Mail, Encounter Books, 665 3rd St., Ste. 330, San Francisco, CA 94107-1951.

CAREER: U.S. Department of Energy, director of the Office of Intelligence, 1994–98, chief of counterintelligence, beginning 1995; worked for TRW, Inc., 1999–2000; Free Congress Foundation, director of media relations; Accuracy in Media, associate editor of AIM Report.

WRITINGS:

Code Name Kindred Spirit: Inside the Chinese Nuclear Espionage Scandal, Encounter Books (San Francisco, CA), 2002.

Contributor to periodicals, including National Review.

SIDELIGHTS: In 1998, while Notra Trulock was head of intelligence at the Department of Energy (DOE), he testified before Congress that he was concerned about security at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Insight on the News reporter J. Michael Waller wrote that "when the FBI couldn't bust the Chinese spies stealing U.S. nuclear-weapons secrets, it went after the spycatcher [Trulock] who exposed them. Humiliated by its inability to crack what intelligence experts call the worst national-security breach in U.S. history, the FBI and other agencies are trying to grind down the man who discovered the espionage, informed Congress of the cover-up and warned the public." Trulock left government service in 1999 and took a job with TRW, Inc.

Trulock wrote Code Name Kindred Spirit: Inside the Chinese Nuclear Espionage Scandal in 2000, being careful not to include any classified information, and submitted it to the DOE for review. The DOE declined to review it, leaving Trulock free to publish it. After National Review published excerpts from the manuscript, Trulock was fired by TRW, purportedly under pressure from the DOE. Trulock's residence was searched, his computer hard drive was confiscated, and his dog was injured. He and the DOE employee from whom he was renting a room filed a lawsuit, charging that their Fourth Amendment rights had been violated.

Trulock writes of his suspicions regarding Wen Ho Lee, including whether Lee passed secret information to China. Trulock was accused of racial bias in naming Lee, but in his book he shows that the inquiry was much broader and included a dozen people, ten of whom the FBI did not investigate. A Publishers Weekly contributor wrote that according to Trulock, Lee became a suspect when he was "recognized as a 'walking security nightmare who violated nearly every security rule' at Los Alamos and 'lied repeatedly' to government officials about his ties to Chinese nuclear scientists." Trulock states that Lee had been considered a security risk more than a decade earlier.

Weekly Standard contributor Henry Sokolski wrote that "One would think that getting the president and Congress to keep nuclear-weapon designs from a strategic competitor wouldn't require a complicated political defense or bureaucratic game plan…. Certainly, Kindred Spirit puts a painfully bright spotlight on how the FBI, the CIA, the National Security Council, and the Department of Energy bungled and denied clear evidence that China was stealing nuclear secrets."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Trulock, Notra, Code Name Kindred Spirit: Inside the Chinese Nuclear Espionage Scandal, Encounter Books (San Francisco, CA), 2002.

PERIODICALS

Computerworld, March 3, 2003, Dan Verton, "A Setup for a Security Nightmare" (interview with Trulock), p. 40.

Human Events, June 2, 2003, Larry Kelley, "Chinese Espionage and the Clinton Administration," review of Code Name Kindred Spirit, p. 28.

Insight on the News, September 4, 2000, J. Michael Waller, "The FBI Targets Key Spycatcher," p. 16.

Publishers Weekly, December 9, 2002, review of Code Name Kindred Spirit, p. 74, Ron Hogan, "Wen Ho Lee Redux: An Insider's Take," interview with Trulock, p. 76.

U.S. News & World Report, September 25, 2000, Chitra Ragavan, "The Lee Debacle Starts Biting Back," p. 24.

Weekly Standard, March 10, 2003, Henry Sokolski, review of Code Name Kindred Spirit, p. 41.